Hansen was right all along: We’ve become friggin’ Venus!
This amusing mistake won’t be on Spencer’s and Braswell’s Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit satellite data plotting website for long, so here’s a screen grab:
[Insert your joke here.]
And yet Accuweather’s expert long-range forecaster Joe Bastardi insists, “Keep in mind, the only records to ‘trust’ are 30 years of objective satellite measurements.”
Seriously, though, there are two reasons I am tweaking Spencer on this. First, for a long time, I (and many others) have been urging Spencer to fix the website that bears his name as “page author.” He has finally changed it, but from my perspective he made it less useful, if not entirely useless.
As I noted three months ago:
There are flaws in Spencer’s graphing system. Dr. Danny Braswell, NSSTC, an author of the graphing page, writes me, “The period used to compute the 20yr record highs ended several years ago. Gaps are because of missing data.” He also writes, “The yearly plots are computed with temperature data from AMSU. The first AMSU was launched in May 1998 on NOAA-15 and data became available later that year. The 20 year records are only there for a few channels and are based on data from the older MSU.”
That means if you want a plot that includes the first half of 1998, which set many records, you need to use Channel 5 and include the “20-year record highs.” But if you want the true record highs, you need to include all recent years (although that makes the graph messy).
Now they’ve nixed the “20-year record highs” line because it would have to be updated continuously to be useful, which they don’t want to do, even though it doesn’t strike me as particularly hard. So now you can’t plot current temps against the hottest year in the satellite record. That seriously undercuts the value of the entire plotting enterprise.
Second, if, say, James Hansen had a similar website that had so many problems for so long — the anti-science crowd would have hectored him no end. And then if he had redone the website and dropped a lot of old data claiming it was too much trouble to keep up, well, you can only imagine the accusations they would level.
So I rather think Spencer should either fix this so that it plots all of the data they have — or nix the whole thing.
NOTE: For those who have been plotting Channel 4 (the near surface layer) and thinking this is a blowout year, that is mainly because the 1998 data isn’t there for the first half of the year but again the website doesn’t make that obvious.
For the record, NOAA points out that both satellite data sets show about the same amount of warming as the land-based record, “which increased at a rate near 0.16°C/decade (0.29°F/decade) during the same 30-year period” “” once you remove the expected stratospheric cooling from the satellite records (see NOAA discussion here).
Related Posts:
- The Great Global Warming Blunder: Roy Spencer asserts (and Morano parrots), “I predict that the proposed cure for global warming – reducing greenhouse gas emissions – will someday seem as outdated as using leeches to cure human illnesses.”
- Should you believe anything John Christy and Roy Spencer say?
- Must-read AP story: Statisticians reject global cooling; Caldeira “” “To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous.”
- How we know global warming is happening
- NASA: The 12-month running mean global temperature has reached a new record in 2010 “” despite recent minimum of solar irradiance
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
GLOBAL WARMING DENIER ROY SPENCER v. SEN. BARBARA BOXER
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qzf6z-oHP8U
Just started watching but into the first few minutes he based his arguments on the data in question.
Hey, it sure felt like it! Ha ha ha.
I went swimming (nearby gigantic Jordan Lake) and it was like taking a warm bath, something that doesn’t usually happen til August.
If it was 457.23 degrees hotter on June 15, 2010 than the same date last year but is obviously cooler as I write this on June 17, 2010 is this not proof of Global Cooling?
why can’t they just do a ’79-’09 mean and be done with it? NCDC et al don’t bother with continuously adjusting means. Besides, the data would become confusing at best, and suspicious at worst if the base mean period kept changing all the time.
Peculiar that such an adjustment comes as 2010 is tracking to be the warmest year on the record, surely that couldn’t have anything to do with disappearing the ability to easily calculate just how warm it is?
No doubt as warming continues and effects such as the Arctic becoming summer ice free become even more obvious, Denialist efforts to obscure and diminish data wil become even more anti science.
The reason why UAH is trusted the least among climate scientists is not because of an apparent amusing software glitch (if it didn’t happen to Rush Limbaugh’s “official climatologist”, deniers would be throwing fits indeed), but because it’s’ easily been the most picked apart, corrected data set, with corrections almost all going in the upward direction and accounting for the entire warming trend.
From the UAH readme file:
“The net effect on this
change was to increase post-Oct 2005 temperatures slightly, and thus the
global trend is increased by about 0.01 C/decade.”
“The new
global trend from Dec 1978 to July 2005 is +0.123 C/decade,
or +0.035 C/decade warmer than v5.1. ”
“Preliminary results
suggest trends could be very slightly warmer, but less than 0.02
C/decade different.”
“The net effect on the trend was
about 0.02 C/decade (more positive)”
“The net change in the overall trend was toward a more
positive value by +0.012 C/decade.”
“The time series is virtually
identical to the earlier version, with the trend
becoming more positive by 0.013 C/decade.”
Flashback to 1997:
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/1997/essd06oct97_1/
Spencer fervently insisted his data was incredibly reliable, when it erroneously showed no warming trend 1979-1997, and all the models were wrong. I’m sure he still does. His followers (Bastardi) certainly do, despite the long sordid history.
Well, it’s not like GISSTEMP has had any errors this year.
Twice the same error as a matter of fact.
Hmmm.. so even the denialist run UAH datasets shows that we are at record setting temperature levels. Wasn’t it just over a year ago that skeptic scientists predicted strong cooling in the coming years due to low solar and a negative PDO? Does this mean we can’t trust the climate predictions of the esteemed big oil sponsored scientists? How strange.
Its going to be interesting to see the denialists speculate if 2010 turns out to be the warmest year (especially during a sunspot minimal)and If we see record low Ice in the Arctic.
Somehow though I feel they will put the usual spin on things. Yes blaming scientists, and the media and public will buy it.
Trouble is- in time that strategy is doomed.
It’s worse than that he’s changed channel 05 over to the AQUA satellite recently The original went back to 1979 the AQUA version is 2002. Not only that but it is not showing the same temperatures over the overlap period. The new ones show less warming of course!
In the changeover he munged the data see:
http://climateandstuff.blogspot.com/2010/06/amsre-data-and-errors.html
Thursday, 17 June 2010
AMSRE data and errors
Spencer has an odd new data series in AMSU series CH05 Aqua. It is especially strange because of the popularity of feb 29ths (6 in last 8 years)!
02/28 -999.000 252.457 252.505 252.329 252.323 252.400 252.249 252.196 252.732
02/29 -999.000 252.492 252.432 252.350 252.415 252.387 252.250 -999.000 -999.000
03/01 -999.000 -999.000 252.625 -999.000 -999.000 -999.000 252.276 252.156 252.647
03/02 -999.000 252.517 252.632 252.511 252.379 252.465 252.251 252.269 252.836
update 10-06-18:
02/28 -999 252.457 252.505 252.329 252.323 252.4 252.249 252.196 252.732
02/29 -999 -999 252.432 -999 -999 -999 252.25 -999 -999
03/01 -999 252.492 252.625 252.35 252.415 252.387 252.276 252.156 252.647
03/02 -999 252.517 252.632 252.511 252.379 252.465 252.251 252.269 252.836
Not only that but there is some large errrors in the data:
08/08/2002 231.674
12/09/2002 233.682
05/11/2003 235.799
25/10/2007 233.854
update 10-06-16 all errors now show -999
It is lucky that Spencer is a sceptic otherwise this would by now have banner headlines claiming that all amsu temperatures are corrupt, Spencer is corrupt, and the world must therefore be cooling. It is all Phil Jones and UEA fault!!!!
sorry the ch05 only went back to 1998 on the “discover” page
#10:
Interesting info about the fiddling with the data. Many have suspected something was off since the channel 5 daily temps hovered way above the 20 year record for most of May, but the anomaly came out to a modest 0.53 degrees, well below the record.
We will probably soon be able to read all about how he is hiding the incline on the fair and balanced sites like WUWT, CA, CD. Not to forget FOX. Of course.
Dr Spencer is already claiming the year will not be a record because of La Nina.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/06/global-average-sea-surface-temperatures-continue-their-plunge/
“Dr Spencer is already claiming the year will not be a record because of La Nina.”
It’s more than that, he’s just using data from 2002-2010 to try and show that something is “unusual” to those reading his blog. Because he’s talking about the rapid change from El Nino to La Nina, it’s odd that he didn’t go back to include the last major incidence of this – 1998/1999.
But remember, this year has already set the record. Our definition of yearly averages is arbitrary – if you use the moving 1yr average instead, we’re already the warmest on record.